1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related generally to the field of speech recognition, and in particular, to a method for diagnosing and overcoming repeated misrecognitions of the same words.
2. Description of Related Art
Sometimes a speech system has problems building clean, accurate base forms. Base forms are instructions as to the way words sound or are pronounced. Users may sometimes have problems with certain words always being misrecognized by a speech recognition system. Presently, whenever the user corrects the same word for some given number of times, for example three times, a speech application will often display a record word dialog so the user can record his or her pronunciation for the word. After the user makes the correction, the correction count starts over again with zero. Thus, if a user has problems with recognition of a particular word, the record word dialog can appear many times. In fact, this is often the case with high frequency words such as "a, an, and, the, it, of", and the like. This repeated presentation of the record word dialog can be very annoying, to say the least. Accordingly, for such high-frequency words, speech applications often do not invoke the record word dialog for these words. This prevents the user from ever recording the user's own pronunciation for the high-frequency words. Thus, if the user has an unusual pronunciation for one of these words, there is no opportunity to record it, so the application must provide another mechanism, for example adding a record word command to the correction window, to force a recording of the word. Unfortunately, most users will not realize they need to do anything special to establish a good base form for the word, so recognition for that word will continue to be poor. On the other hand, if the user is constantly being prompted for recordings of the same word, then something more serious is wrong.